A dazzling quest whose outcome will raise humanity to unparalleled heights of glory--or ring down a curtain of endless night . . .
1681: When Sir Isaac Newton turns his restless mind to the ancient art of alchemy, he unleashes Philosopher's Mercury, a primal source of matter and a key to manipulating the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. Now, as France and England battle for its control, Louis XIV calls for a new weapon--a mysterious device known only as Newton's Cannon.
Half a world away, a young apprentice named Benjamin Franklin stumbles across a dangerous secret. Pursued by a deadly enemy--half scientist, half sorcerer--Ben makes his fugitive way to England. Only Newton himself can help him now. But who will help Sir Isaac? For he was not the first to unleash the Philosopher's Mercury. Others were there before him. Creatures as scornful of science as they are of mankind. And burning to be rid of both . . .
In our own timeline, Newton did turn his mind to the study of alchemy and magic after completing his famous investigations on physics, but reached only a dead end. In Keyes' alternate world, Newton discovers a substance called the "philosopher's mercury" and stands the world on its head. Within a few decades, applications have been made in all fields, producing analogs of twentieth-century technology in the dawn of the eighteenth century. Terrible weapons boil blood and turn castle walls into crystal in a renewed war between England and France, while devices known as aether-schreibers enable people to communicate instantly over vast distances.
However the aether-schreiber has a limitation -- it works only in pairs. At the heart of each device is a bit of glass known as a chime, which is the separated twin of the device to which it is mated (to make the two chimes, one cuts in half a single piece of this special glass). Because of this, a group of scientists working on a secret super-weapon for King Louis XIV rely upon them for secure communications with colleagues working in various countries.(One major plotline deals with a brilliant young woman who is denied the ability to fully use her mathematical ability simply because she is a woman, and how she becomes involved with intrigues around Louis XIV in her endless quest for intellectual sustenance).
However a young Boston printer's apprentice named Benjamin Franklin, as a part of a money-making scheme for his brother, seeks a way to create a tunable aether-schreiber. In the course of his experiments he attracts the wrath of the mysterious Trevor Bracewell, who tells him to experiment no more. Yet Ben's insatiable curiosity drives him to discover the secret of tuning an aether-schreiber, and in doing so he stumbles upon some curious mathematical correspondence. He offers some solutions to the correspondents' problems, and only afterward does he realize that he should not have assumed that the writers were English simply because they wrote in that language. When Bracewell returns to murder him and instead murders his brother, Ben realizes that he may well have inadvertantly aided the enemies of England. He then flees Boston and heads for London, where he seeks out Newton and his following in a desperate effort to discover the true secret of "Newton's Cannon" before it is too late.
People were staring and shouting from the shore as well as if they had never seen a man skating upon the Moldau before. But perhaps they had not, he thought smugly. Not when it wasn't frozen.
Grinning, he pushed on, still marveling at the way his shoes pressed against the flowing water without touching it, like two magnets with like poles shoved together. He turned back upstream, laughing at the peculiar resistance, Katarina and her father already forgotten, sliding two steps forward but nevertheless moving back with the vaster sweep of the current. Turning again, he lost his balance and teetered precariously on one foot, arms windmilling, but he did not fall. He knew all about falling from practice the day before: The shoes stayed out of the water, making it hard to get his head up; the only solution was to take them off, a clumsy business.
